…But our iOS passwords go to 'Eleven'

If you haven't been following the controversy around Apple and the FBI, maybe all you need to know is that you should probably have an 11 character, random alpha-numeric passcode on your iPhone. This will probably be good enough to protect your iPhone from being cracked open by a brute force attack, no matter what Apple is forced to do for law enforcement.

If you haven’t been following the controversy around Apple and the FBI, maybe all you need to know is that you should probably have an 11 character, random alpha-numeric passcode (or password) on your iPhone. This will probably be good enough to protect your iPhone from being cracked open by a brute force attack, no matter what Apple is forced to do for law enforcement.

Here’s a good story from Micah Lee at theintercept.com (click HERE) that provides a relatively simple explanation of the entire issue, including why an 11 character iPhone passcode should take a brute force cracking attempt about 253 years to succeed.

But keep in mind that, if you use iCloud backups, your data may be accessible by Apple, and if you use iTunes to back up your data to your computer, you’ll have to use a much stronger encryption key to slow down a brute force attack.